Monthly Archives: July 2009

juicer and dynamic merges

While a hack, a dirty way of getting Juicer to merge JavaScript files at every load is the following, which I’m running under a custom Webrick setup:

# Shamelessly cheat so Juicer cannot close its copy of STDOUT
module Juicer
LOGGER.instance_eval do
def close ; end
end
end
 
# Later, far away in a custom handler
Juicer::Cli.run(%w[merge -s –force -o /tmp/output.js js/my.js])
# Unfortunately, [...]

hyper stealing on the stock exchange

Traders Profit With Computers Set at High Speed:

Soon, thousands of orders began flooding the markets as high-frequency software went into high gear. Automatic programs began issuing and canceling tiny orders within milliseconds to determine how much the slower traders were willing to pay. The high-frequency computers quickly determined that some investors’ upper limit was $26.40. [...]

Persevere, ExtJS 3.0, and you

Recently, I spent some time playing with Persevere, best summed up by its page:

The Persevere Server is an object storage engine and application server (running on Java/Rhino) that provides persistent data storage of dynamic JSON data in an interactive server side JavaScript environment…

Since it speaks JSON HTTP/REST, it’s an excellent candidate for integration with ExtJS. [...]

Geany GTK based editor

After fighting with the latest version of Kate’s strange way of allowing you to configure the usage of tabs rather than spaces, I decided to give a Geany a try. Normally I steer clear of GTK applications simply because I’ve used so many poorly written ones. Fortunately, Geany does not fall into that [...]

Discover card attempts to scam me into disability insurance

I received a call today from someone claiming to be calling on behalf of Discover with some entity called Monumental something, wanting to sell me some kind of a disability policy (maybe this?) paid for the first three months by Discover, then by me thereafter and charged to my card.
The first person I spoke to, [...]

kubuntu 9.04 install to fail in 43 minutes

Just installed kubuntu 9.04. I already managed to crash plasma once by attempting to unmount an already unmounted USB drive that plasma still thought was mounted. Clicking the eject icon left me with a completely hung plasma. Killing it and running it anew from konsole brought it back to life.
For some odd [...]

Managing Systems with Chef: Sandbox Play

Chef is an awesome tool for centralized management of systems and resources. Chef recipes are best consumed in a sandbox, first, before being deployed. Below, I describe a simple sandbox setup using VirtualBox and Debian Lenny.
Using VirtualBox, define a new virtual machine. I used the business card ISO to install a bare [...]